Most Are Wrong About Cambridge Analytica And That Is Not The Scary Part

MENLO PARK, CA - APRIL 05: A protester with the group 'Raging Grannies' holds a sign during a demonstration outside of Facebook headquarters on April 5, 2018 in Menlo Park, California. Protesters with the activist group 'Raging Grannies' staged a demonstration outside of Facebook headquarters calling for better consumer protection and online privacy in the wake of Cambridge Analytica's unauthorized access to up to 87 million Facebook users' data. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

You keep a semi-private diary. It contains personal contact information and provides periodic updates that you share with your friends about where you go, the food you eat, or sometimes what you think about life. One day, one of your friends took the diary and sold it to someone for a couple of bucks.

Why would you do that…friend? Why?

Facebook still has a responsibility to keep trust with its user base. In fact, users started mounting pressure back in 2015 requesting Facebook change some of its policies that allowed all of this user data to get scraped, and Facebook made adjustments. But it’s going a bit too far to call this a serious breach of privacy. It certainly was not a hacking of Facebook.

When Aleksandr Kogan, the professor behind the app that captured all the data, requested permission to access Facebook profiles with his personality test app he also requested information from your friend’s profiles as well. To find out how bad this moment in time really is, I reached out to the CEO of BlitzMetrics, Dennis Yu, who is considered a Facebook advertising expert.

“Cambridge Analytica bought data from 80 plus million Facebook profiles from a quiz app. While that sounds scary, the reality is there’s little they could have done with the data. A few years ago, Facebook prevented advertisers from loading up user data from apps that aren’t yours,” Yu explains.

Most marketing professionals are skeptical of the real impact Cambridge Analytica ever had. Yu points out that, “Cambridge Analytica is a favorite company of Facebook ad professionals to mock, since we know what they claim Cambridge Analytica is doing is technically impossible. The media and politicians are not technicians, so unscrupulous marketing firms play on those fears.”

One of the scariest parts of this entire mess is that our governing officials, those who make our laws, do not have a fundamental understanding of how social media works. Facebook is different from companies likes banks or credit agencies. Through poor security, Equifax lost data that was supposed to be secured and that included Social Security numbers, Driver’s License numbers, addresses, phone numbers, names, and who knows what else. Most of that information is not something people are posting publicly on Facebook.

Yu points out, “Even if [Cambridge Analytica] could upload user level data, how people responded four years ago to silly quiz questions to earn virtual points is not enough to build a robust psychological profile. Facebook’s own targeting system has millions of options, updated almost in real-time.”

Politicians who are making this appear as if it is on the same playing field as the Equifax breach are ridiculous. The American people should demand that their elected officials be better educated on the technological world we live in, before proposing useless or harmful legislation. This is not a trivial issue, and affects both individual citizens and businesses in our free market environment.

The media and political outcry is causing a backlash that will push Facebook to limit a business’s abilities to effectively and ethically reach their markets. The opportunity to use Facebook to target specific potential customers based on psychographic metrics is not new, nor something Cambridge Analytica invented. What Cambridge Analytica did wrong was violate Facebook’s terms of service, lie about it, then pretend they fixed it. Any competent marketer could create ad sets that target groups of people based on their interests.

It is also unfortunate that people are struggling to grasp that when one publishes material online, even to a small group of as few as a hundred people, it is no longer private and you should not trust that this information will not be shared. Ask any parent of a teenager and they will inform you that they tell their children to treat everything they post online as if it is public knowledge.

This doesn’t mean Facebook is innocent. But companies need to be involved in educating the public on how these systems work, or risk losing the ability to utilize the amazing targeting capabilities of Facebook advertising.

Jabez LeBret is Chief of Schools at Sisu Academy, the first tuition-free private boarding high school in California. Cofounder of two companies he is also a regular Millennial Management speaker.

Jabez is embarking on a mission to change the lives of local high school students by opening the first tuition-free boarding high school with a self-funding model in California. He is formerly co-founder of two companies in the legal profession, a highly sought after speaker...